It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that
all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and
all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were addressed to a woman. This
division cannot be literally justified. In the first group some eighty
of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the
masculine pronoun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining
forty there is no clear indication of the kind. Many of these forty are
meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi.
cxix. cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time
(cxxiii.), or 'benefit of ill' (cxix.) The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.),
the last of the first 'group,' does little more than sound a variation on
the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a
boy. {97} And there is no valid objection to the assumption that the
poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi.
xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second 'group' (cxxvii.-cliv.)
have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No.
cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the
virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv.
is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like Lyly's song of 'Cupid and
Campaspe,' and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly's
songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv.
soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid's fire.
{98}

Main topics of the first 'group.'

The choice and succession of topics in each 'group' give to neither
genuine cohesion. In the first 'group' the long opening sequence
(i.-xvii.) forms the poet's appeal to a young man to marry so that his
youth and beauty may survive in children. There is almost a
contradiction in terms between the poet's handling of that topic and his
emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse
alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend's youth and
accomplishments. The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets
(cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. ci. cvii.) These alternate with
conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet's
affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of
absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.) There are many
reflections on the nocturn